Hannah Barbaric

“Girls,” “Enlightened,” and the comedy of cruelty.

Created by Lena Dunham, “Girls” is the latest in a long line of narratives about smart, strange girls diving into experience.Credit Illustration by Michael Carson

The HBO series “Girls” has been a trending topic all year, but in one sense it’s nothing new. Created, written, and directed by the twenty-six-year-old Lena Dunham, who plays the wannabe memoirist Hannah Horvath, “Girls” is merely the latest in a set of culture-rattling narratives about young women, each of which has inspired enough bile to overwhelm any liver. Among the most famous is Mary McCarthy’s novel “The Group,” from 1963, with its scene of a humiliated girl sitting in Washington Square Park with her contraceptive “pessary.” Women clung to that book like a life raft, but “The Group” was sniffed at by Norman Podhoretz as “a trivial lady writer’s novel,” while Norman Mailer called its author “a duncey broad” who was “in danger of ending up absurd, an old-maid collector of Manx cats.” (Lady writers, beware of men named Norman.)

This dialectic recurs again and again. There was Rona Jaffe’s dishy potboiler “The Best of Everything,” from 1958; Wendy Wasserstein’s plays of the seventies and eighties (a sweeter vintage); and Mary Gaitskill’s collection of kinky short stories, “Bad Behavior,” from 1988. (Not to mention the work of Sylvia Plath and every song by Fiona Apple and Liz Phair.) These are stories about smart, strange girls diving into experience, often through bad sex with their worst critics. They’re almost always set in New York. While other female-centered hits, with more likable heroines, are ignored or patronized, these racy fables agitate audiences, in part because they violate the dictate that women, both fictional and real, not make anyone uncomfortable.

Like “Girls,” these are also stories about privilege, by and about women who went to fancy schools. Wasserstein’s awesomely strange early play “Uncommon Women and Others” features the Hannah Horvath of Mount Holyoke: fat, sharp-eyed, horny Holly Kaplan, making late-night phone calls to a man she’s barely met. “The Group” was about Vassar graduates in lousy marriages to leftist blowhards. “The Best of Everything” starred Caroline, a Radcliffe graduate, who falls for an older drunk who might as well be “Girls” ’ sardonic barista, Ray (the great Alex Karpovsky). Because such stories exposed the private lives of male intellectuals, they got critiqued as icky, sticky memoir—score-settling, not art. (In contrast, young men seeking revenge on their exes are generally called “comedians” or “novelists” or “Philip Roth.”) There’s clearly an appetite for this prurient ritual, in which privileged girls, in their rise to power, get humiliated, first in fiction, then in criticism—like a Roman Colosseum for gender anxieties.

“Girls” has been attacked, and lauded, and exploited as S.E.O. link bait, and served up as the lead for style-trend pieces, to the point of exhaustion. The authors of these analyses have often fretted over privilege: the show is too white, Hannah’s a spoiled brat, or a bad role model for Millennials, or too fat to qualify to have sex on cable television. But when there’s a tiny aperture for women’s stories—and a presumption that men won’t watch them—when almost no women are Hollywood directors, when few women write TV shows, of course it’s the privileged ones who get traction. These artists have what Dunham has referred to as Hannah’s Unsinkable Molly Brown force. (Molly Brown, after all, was a mouthy rich woman who survived the Titanic.) To me, the whiteness of “Girls” is realistic, although the show is slyer and clearer about class than about race. But, as Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote recently in The Atlantic, “the problem isn’t the Lena Dunham show about a narrow world. The problem is that there aren’t more narrow worlds on screen. Broader is not synonymous with better.”

The specificity of “Girls” also links it to earlier eras. In particular, it echoes a time when the legendary wildness of male New York intellectuals and artists was made possible by middle-class girlfriends who paid the rent and absorbed hipness from the kitchen. As Joyce Johnson, Jack Kerouac’s onetime girlfriend, observed in her scathing memoir “Minor Characters,” an account of kohl-eyed Barnard coeds fleeing to Greenwich Village, “Even a very young woman can achieve old-ladyhood, become the mainstay of someone else’s self-destructive genius.”

In a different time, Hannah and her friends are the bohemians, fresh out of Oberlin. Hannah, her uptight friend Marnie, her decadent friend Jessa, Jessa’s cousin Shoshanna, and an assortment of male friends and lovers live in shifting roommate arrangements, on the fringes of New York’s creative industries. With admirable bluntness, “Girls” exposes the financial safety nets that most stories about New York—and many New Yorkers—prefer to leave invisible. Last year, at Jessa’s surprise wedding to a finance guy, a scene that might have been the climax of an ordinary meet-cute romantic comedy, her cousin Shoshanna blurted out, “Everyone’s a stupid whore.” The show began with Hannah stealing a maid’s tip, and characters are forever ducking out on the rent or ogling someone’s brownstone. In an early episode, Hannah was humiliated when her hookup Adam masturbated in front of her; in a fury, she turned her complaints into a demented dominatrix routine, which ended with a demand for cab money, plus extra for pizza and gum. Then she took a hundred-dollar bill—likely the one that Adam’s grandmother sends him each month. It was a metaphor for her own confused ambitions: earlier, she’d sabotaged an office job she didn’t want anyway; now she’d turned her sex life into art and got paid.

This season, it’s Marnie who walks straight into the spider’s web. Fired from her art-gallery gig, she finds a “pretty girl” job where she caters to rich men. She meets a scornful art star she’s got a crush on, and he locks her into one of his installations and bombards her with violent videos. She staggers out like Patty Hearst, gasping, “You’re so fucking talented.” But he’s a pompous jackrabbit in bed—he makes her stare at a doll the entire time—and after their awful sex she bursts out laughing, with a surprising, loose, lovely spontaneity. Grim as their date is, the experience also seems cathartic, even liberating—it’s a bad time that’s a good story. Maybe not now; maybe in twenty years. For now, she smiles in the bathroom, and texts Hannah, telling her where she is.

As Elaine Blair wrote last year in The New York Review of Books, in pretty much the only essay on the show worth reading, “For all of its emphasis on sexual and romantic experience, Girls never suggests that a smoothly pleasant sex life is something worthy of serious aspiration. The ultimate prize to be wrung from all of these baffling sexual predicaments is a deeper understanding of oneself.” For some, this is bleak viewing. But for others the harshest of these stories can be thrilling, because they make private pain public (and embarrassing stories funny), and also because they work as a sly how-to, on ways to thicken one’s skin. In its first season, “Girls” captured how sex can be theatre—not just faking orgasms but faking coolness, kinkiness, independence. There’s power in gulling men, which is Jessa’s stock-in-trade. (One of the best plots this season involves Jessa’s husband’s eyes being opened: “You’re my worst nightmare,” he announces, almost in awe, as their marriage collapses in a Williamsburg loft.)

Still, the most significant thing about “Girls” may be that it’s not a book, a play, a song, or a poem. And not a movie, either; since women rarely control production, there are few movies of this type, and even fewer that have mass impact. “Girls” is television. It’s in the tradition of sitcoms in which comics play humbled versions of themselves: Lucy, Roseanne, Raymond, Seinfeld. But it’s also TV in a more modern mode: spiky, raw, and auteurist. During the past fifteen years, the medium has been transformed by bad boys like Walter White and sad sacks like Louis C.K. “Girls” is the crest of a second, female-centered wave of change, on both cable and network, of shows that are not for everyone, that make viewers uncomfortable. It helps that the show’s creator has her own roguish, troublemaking quality, a Molly Brown air that lets Dunham wade into controversy without drowning.

Like every “concern troll”—the Internet term for one who ices her sneer with dignified worry—I’m probably making “Girls” sound like a dissertation. It’s a comedy: a slight one, an odd one, an emotional one. The show isn’t perfect—it’s got cartoonish bits—but then most interesting art isn’t. And, unlike previous versions of this story, which arrived complete, “Girls,” like Hannah, isn’t done: because it’s television, it’s being built in front of us, absorbing and defying critiques along the way. It lingers and rankles and upsets. Like any groundbreaking TV, it shows the audience something new, then dares it to look away. Small wonder some viewers itch to give the show a sound spanking.

“Girls” airs on Sundays, the same night as another HBO series with an off-putting female protagonist, one that’s received too little attention instead of too much. Now in its second season, “Enlightened” is an anxious, jubilant comedy created by Mike White, starring Laura Dern as Amy Jellicoe, a corporate employee sent to rehab in Hawaii after she has a nervous breakdown. When she returns to L.A., she’s banished to the company’s basement, to work among the data-processing drones, one of whom is the nerdy Tyler, played by White himself. If Hannah mirrors Louis C.K., Jellicoe is a sister to Larry David. She wants to be peaceful, brave, and decent, but her needy personality makes everyone she meets want to claw off his or her face—and this season, when Jellicoe becomes a corporate whistle-blower, her egotism and her idealism are indistinguishable.

This might be unbearable, if it weren’t for “Enlightened” ’s highly original and humane comic engine: it’s a satire of feminine New Age do-gooderism that shares the values of all it satirizes. Like “Parks and Recreation,” “Enlightened” bridges the comedy divide between warmth and smarts: it makes me cry more than any comedy I’ve seen. If “Girls” teaches you to thicken your skin, “Enlightened” advocates emotional openness, even when it hurts.

The third episode, which aired two weeks ago, focussed on Amy’s ex-husband, Levi, who goes to the same Hawaiian rehab center, at her urging. Instead of her narration, we hear his. Like many smart addicts, he takes in his surroundings with blighted insight: “They say to live in the moment. But what if the moment is endless? It’s headaches and phlegm and farts and whiners whining about every fucking thing that ever happened to ’em.” He bonds with the bad kids, sliding first toward ecstatic freedom, then disillusionment, then emptiness. In the end, he’s saved by thoughts of Amy and her refusal to see him as a lost cause. “You saw something in me that didn’t exist,” he says. “Or maybe it did. Maybe you’re my higher power.”

In the next episode, we’re back to Amy, who’s flirting with an investigative journalist who describes Internet activism as a way for nobodies to become important. This idea hits Amy like a jolt of electricity, and what follows is a provocative, visually artful meditation, directed by White, on the temptations of the digital world. (Other directors this season include Nicole Holofcener and Todd Haynes.) Amy attends a glamorous party of the global digerati; a montage draws subtle links among hacked e-mails, a C.E.O. watching YouTube footage, and laptop-tapping strangers at a café. In her intoxication, Amy sees the Internet in spiritual terms: “I can hear its angels humming.” Like her brand-new Twitter feed, “Enlightened” can seem unnerving and out of control. But you should follow. ♦